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Helping Others During COVID-19: Three Words to Focus on

April 2, 2020

Want to Help Others During COVID-19? Three Words You Should Be Focusing On.

Hi, I’m Melissa Cameron, Senior Counsel CSR and Philanthropic Services with Sunwest Communications. I’m at home along with the rest of the world and it’s interesting – we’ve been getting some questions from some of our corporate partners around “What’s next? We’ve taken care of our employees, we’ve set up our communication plan, our businesses are in place, and our employees are asking us ‘what can we do? What can we do for the community?’” And it’s such a great question and there’s not an easy answer, especially because we’re all staying in place. But I’d like to offer up a couple of words and they start with the letter R. As we’re working with one of our nonprofit partners, we’re taking a look at what their needs are in terms of response, recovery and resiliency. So first, the needs of the community and nonprofits is emergency response. So how can we help those nonprofits that are right there at the front line? And I would say there are virtual food drives. If you contact your local food bank or your local shelters, there are ways in which your company could do a virtual drive, and your employees from their home could help support those drives and provide the emergency needs for the community. And then we look at recovery. There are organizations out there who are providing necessary mental, physical, and business needs for clients who are in need and struggling. “How do I pay my rent? How do I even have a conversation with my telephone provider, or with my landlord, to defer those payments?” Does your company offer tax accounting services? What’s your professional acumen that you can bring to the table? That brings me to resiliency. When we think about partnering with our nonprofits from a corporate standpoint, what are the unique services that you can bring to bear. And we’ve gotta get innovative. This is the time for us to think outside of the box. When you look at who responded after 9/11, who rethought the way in which they could outreach into the community? And I’m gonna throw out another r-word, and that is reputation. Those are companies that we know, their reputation scores rose in the ranks, because they were able to respond in a creative and innovative way to help the community in a time of crisis. And that’s the challenge today, right? Is for you to be able to think about how you can respond, how you can be part of the recovery, and resiliency – not just for the betterment of the community, but also for the betterment of your company’s reputation. This is Melissa Cameron with Sunwest Communications. Those are your “Rs” for the day.

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